3 Marketing Lessons Learned from the Pardot Coffee Club

Nicole Conley, Client Advocate at Pardot, has worked extensively with clients over the past two years, and recently attended her first Pardot Coffee Club. Nicole joins us to share some of the hot topics discussed at the Club’s most recent meeting — as well as a few best practices for marketers using marketing automation on a regular basis.

The marketing world we live in today can be a daunting one. Marketing automation and CRM platforms continue to grow. Industry trends evolve at breakneck speed. New programs pop up daily. No one has the time to keep up with all of this, do their full-time job, and ensure that they are fully utilizing the tools they already have.

To combat this, a savvy group of Pardot users in the Atlanta area created the Pardot Coffee Club. The Coffee Club meets on a semi-regular basis to collaborate and discuss challenges, victories, strategies, and general Pardot usage. Over the past few years, this group has grown to include up to 40 attendees at a time, all coming together to talk shop on Pardot.

I’ve spent the last two years as a Pardot Client Advocate on the west coast, so last week I experienced the Atlanta Coffee Club for the first time. It was an incredible two-hour discussion, and I left feeling inspired and excited. But since we can’t all be in Atlanta, I wanted to share what I observed and learned from this dynamic and creative group. The conversation centered around three main themes:

1. Tradeshow and Event Marketing

One user shared a success story of how they optimized their tradeshow marketing through Pardot, prompting an awesome discussion. The top takeaways:

Drive traffic to landing pages pre-event

Encourage prospects to sign up for live demos

Play cornhole near your booth to pique the interest of passers-by at the event!

Here on the Advocate team at Pardot, we have a few main focuses for getting the most out of event marketing.

Pre-Event:

Let attendees know you’re going to be at the event ahead of time and how they can find you.

Segment your marketing lists (i.e. those who live near the event’s location) and send targeted email messages during the weeks before the event.

2. Outbound Marketing Strategy

Outbound marketing remains important even as inbound marketing becomes more and more prevalent. The key point discussed at the Coffee Club was making sure that the flow of communication makes sense in the buyer’s journey. From an outbound sales call to flowing through one (and sometimes multiple!) drip nurture programs, communication can be hard to keep a handle on.

If this is a topic on your mind, here are some tips to help make sure that your communication is streamlined from sourcing the prospect to closing the deal.

Have Sales Users Use Marketing-Created and Approved Templates For Emails

Through the new Salesforce® Engage platform, marketing-created templates are available for Sales users in both Salesforce and Gmail. This helps make sure that communication is consistent and in line with your marketing strategy, while providing sales more control over when that communication is sent.

Use Suppression Lists to Prevent Marketing Fatigue

Dynamic lists can be created to identify prospects who have received a certain amount of emails over a set amount of time to ensure your prospects aren’t being contacted too frequently. This can be easily overlooked with several campaigns running at once. Using frequency lists as suppression lists on your campaigns allows marketers to control exactly how often prospects are being emailed, making sure “too many emails” doesn’t cause unsubscribes to increase.

3. Closed-Loop Marketing

Tracking return on investment is huge in the minds of marketers. Here are some great options for closing the loop on your marketing strategy:

Pardot’s Prospect Lifecycle Report

This out-of-the-box Pardot report combines information from Pardot and Salesforce to create a high-level view of how prospects move through your sales cycle. Learn more in our Prospect Lifecycle Report Knowledge Base article.

Salesforce’s Campaign Influence Report

This one is a bit more complex, but is the best way to combine the marketing influence of your Pardot information with the flexible and detailed reporting in Salesforce. For more information on setting up this dynamic ROI reporting system, check out our best practices article Pardot & Salesforce Campaign ROI.

Overall, this was an incredible event. If you’re located outside of the Atlanta area and are interested in creating a Coffee Club in your area, feel free to start a group on LinkedIn, or reach out to the Client Advocate team. We’d love to help!